On the last Friday of term, just after the bell rang, Eva came up behind me at the bag racks. ‘Hey,’ she said. I was tying my jumper around my waist. ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Do you want to sleep over at my house tomorrow night?’ It had been ages since Eva and I had spent time together, just the two of us. ‘I’ll have to ask.’ ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Get your mum to call my mum tonight.’ She reached into her pocket and handed me a piece of paper that she’d ripped out of her science book. ‘This is her […]

Aldo remembers, through the late-night haze of his seventieth birthday party in a back room of the Brisbane Workers’ Club, with the glow of port on his lips and Mary on his lap, the week in 1999 when he twice injured his hand. His eyes blur with time and distance. His well-wishers allow him, as they have learned to do in recent years, a moment to himself. He drifts amid the tunes from Rich’s guitar and the plumes of Mary’s cigar and his fingers move over the dimples and ridges of disturbed tissue on his right palm, the papery skin, […]

Up here I am a bird. The wind blows through my feathers when I spread my wings and I am alive. The treetops tip and bow, beckoning me to launch into the wildness, to freedom. But I am only a fledgling; the thought of flight makes me quiver. I nestle into my sheltered perch, the scent of eucalypt swooning me into stillness. Up here in my tree I can do anything. She can’t stop me. She can’t even see me. Until the autumn of my fourth year of school I had an average life. My dad mostly off driving […]

Outside the bent metal blinds, a mouse-like Corolla sat parked in the driveway. The streetlights shone off its maroon paint, and the sky behind it was lavender. On its roof a sign read in bold blue letters, ‘FLIENDSHIP DRIVING INSTRUCTOR’—except for the L, black in a yellow square, and the P, red in white. What the hell was Fliendship? A play on the fact that there isn’t an el sound in Japanese, so all Asians can only say ar? Winston had told me he was going to pick me up, so I reckoned this was his ride. I left my […]

ONE You’re on your back in a Tintin t-shirt, a half-removed tomato sauce stain ground into the grey cotton. You’re reading poetry aloud to yourself, because this usually works when you’re tired and your brain is going too fast. Harry and his lover are in the other bedroom, together. You can’t ever say that word out loud: lover. You hate lover like you hate partner and panties and daddy and cock. Lover is being at a wine tasting and not liking wine. Lover is sour like fire, unripe pears, passionfruit notes and wine clear as water. It feels rank […]

Cassie You’ve never met Cassie’s Dad. You couldn’t even tell what he looks like, but you know he’s shit—she’s told you enough. ‘She talks about her Dad a lot.’ ‘Yeah, I know—it’s weird, right?’ you say absentmindedly, inspecting the hair on your legs that has grown since you’ve been back in the cold. Picking at the ingrown hairs, pushing back against the grain to feel the spikes in the gap between your boots and cuffs. She’s talking to you about Sarah’s Dad. She calls him Daddy. ‘But I mean, is it weird, though? Like just ‘cos my Dad’s a […]

I dreamt of Sam last night. His hair was still the colour of straw but longer than I’d ever seen it. He had a rough fringe at the front and it reached his shoulders at the back. I wonder if he looks like that now, it’s been years since I’ve seen him. The image was hazy, like a photo filter with a softening 70s colour scheme. He was leaning against the trunk of a gum tree and seemed sad, kind of down and out, and he was wearing the old kind of John Denver glasses he had when I first […]

Shakespearean verse, complete with loving intention. It held the sweetest of sentiments, just not quite eternal. Nick, who is middle-aged, proper English, and wears serious glasses (even when he’s not injecting thunderous lasers of light into your body), does not appear to have any tattoos himself. It’s one of the first things I ask him. ‘No,’ he says. He passes me a form. It reads: Do you drink alcohol? Do you smoke? Do you spend time in the sun? The editor in me thinks he could sum this up with one question: What mistakes are you currently making? I’m not […]

When I told Dad I needed the binoculars for bird watching, I wasn’t really lying. Most of the day I’ve used them to stare at Robin Davidson’s neck. I don’t even like him and I hate that he’s eating chips and gravy. They’d be good and salty and I don’t have any money. Robin isn’t from around here. He’s from somewhere big and you can see it on him, the way he moves. I wish I wasn’t from here either, that I could live somewhere else, even if it was only with Nan on the other side of town. When […]